To Be Young

I’ll let you in on a secret, if you promise not to tell.

Promise?

Okay.

Here’s the secret: I’m a monster. In every way, of course, but the literal. I wasn’t born like regular people, into a happy home, surrounded by wholesome people, at exactly the right time. I’m the result of an experiment concocted out of short-lived lies.

I’m like Frankenstein’s Creature. I’m probably more grotesque. He was stitched together out of dead people, a pitiful being abandoned by his Creator from birth. I took the blood of living people, and unlike the Creature, I keep on taking as I grow.

What is it like to live like this? As a monster, as a demon, as a bitch?

That’s a secret too.

To My Sister

I’m twenty-one today. My friends and I are going out to drink, although we’ve been out to drink before. It feels special today. Flashing my ID like the police in the movies, stepping into the dark stuffed air like an emancipated woman, remembering how I had passed for twenty-six once at a club, with my sister, three years ago. It’s electrifying. I feel drunk already on how much I’ve grown.

We head over to the bar. We’re armed with our order, having an hour crystallizing them the day before. Sarah’s rum and coke. Karen’s screwdriver. I’m long island iced tea. The bartender barely blinks at our approach, having seen people like us before. “What would you like?” he says.

Neither of my friends answer. We hadn’t planned for who would go first. The sudden silence solidifies in my throat, poking at my skin, making it hard to breathe. I step forward. The bar seems abnormally high, like normal tables do when you’re five. He looks at me. “Long island iced tea,” I say, my voice loud.

“Alright. Would you like to open up a tab?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say. “Yes.”

I fumble with my purse, trying to find my credit card. He looks on from somewhere up above. I finally manage to hand it over. He takes it with a smile and walks away. I look over at my friends.

“I did it,” I say.

They ambush me. Karen puts an arm around my shoulders, and Sarah claps a hand on my back. They congratulate me, we talk, we laugh, we joke like I had just walked through fire and lived.

What I can’t tell them is how I wish I wasn’t here right now. How I wish that the arm around me and the congratulations in my ears weren’t theirs but someone else’s.

My sister is eight years older than me. Like a parent, she has always been my role model. She fights against the people who picks on her, she speaks up when she’s wronged, she never gives up on what she wants, and she’s pretty.

I love her. I can never be like her.

What’s bizarre, though, is that my sister looks up to me. She says I’m smart. In her eyes, I’m a hard worker. I’m mature. But, Unnie, these are qualities that you’ve given me. They coat me, uncomfortable, sticky, like the drink that spills on me as I dance.

I remember when you told me your secret. We were sitting on my bed, everyone else asleep. The lamp was giving off orange light. My hands were holding each other. The pillow was at my back, and the blanket was covering my legs, but I can’t recall your face. We must not have been looking at each other.

When you told me, I didn’t know what to say. I don’t remember if I said anything. What I do remember is how I felt.

Nothing. Nothing, except crippling guilt for feeling nothing.

I’m only a monster, I can say. I wasn’t made to feel things like sympathy. At the time, I must have at least acted the emotion well, for you say you love me now.

I’m not your sister, I want to say. I’m stupid, I’m lazy, I’m a child, now and forever.

I won’t say it. As uncomfortable as this sheen of lies is, I’d rather you lap up false happiness than look at me with sober eyes.

To My Brother

I sit down at one of the tables, my third glass of long island iced tea in hand. I feel nauseous. I made a fool of myself, as I always do when I dance drunk, but being drunk, I didn’t care. I would still be up there if I could, but I wasn’t made for physical exertion. I’m sweating, dizzy and tired.

“Hey!”

Someone sits down next to me. I look over at him, happy. “Hi!” I say back.

He has dirty blond hair, a round nose, and blue eyes. He’s fit in the way college guys tend to be, smiling at me in the way none of them ever do. That smile tickles my brain, whispering to me, telling me that he and I have met somewhere before.

“What’s up?” he says.

“Oh, you know. Resting.” I take a sip of my drink. “I was dancing.”

He laughs. “Yeah, I saw.”

I frown. “I like dancing.”

“I could tell.”

“Do you like dancing?”

“No, I’m not much of a dancer.”

“Shame.”

“Why’s that a shame?”

“I don’t know.” I look at him again. He’s still smiling, that patronizing amusement every sober person seems to have. I sit up straighter. “Who are you? You look familiar.”

He’s frowning now. Serves him right. “Kyle,” he says. “I’m in your creative writing class.”

“Kyle!” I yell out, triumphant.

“Yeah.”

It’s the middle of the semester. I take another sip of my drink, trying to slide over this sticky moment. “What’s up, Kyle?”

“Nothing much.” He smiles again, cold now. “Just wanted to come over and say hi. Actually, I should get back to my friends.” He gets up. “See you in class.”

“Yeah, see you.”

He leaves. I gulp down the rest of my drink. That didn’t go well. But does it really matter? I wipe my mouth, looking back over to where my friends are. After all, I barely know the guy.

He’s a good writer, though. I scowl at myself. It’s difficult to tell what exactly I feel for people like him. Love? Hate? Maybe respect. Yes, that’s it. Respect. But it bites, you know, when someone whom you respect does not respect you.

My brother is also a good writer. He’s two years younger than me; tall, smart, meticulous, good-natured. When we were little, people mistook us for twins. Now, people mistake him as the older sibling. We both know it’s not just the height.

He and I are friends. I love my sister, but she was a tyrannous time bomb when we were children. Around her, we learned to never talk back. Our parents were more lax, but only because they were never around. He and I stuck close together to prevent insanity. We were equals then, telling each other everything with no regard to age, to gender, to height. We tell each other a lot of things now too.

I told him, for example, when I had my first drink, when I got my first tattoo, when I went on my first date, when I received my first A in college.

But there are also a lot of things I will never tell him. I’ll never tell him, for example, how I used to wish he had no friends, so that I could feel better about having so little. I’ll never tell him how I used to hate the way Mom praised him for every little thing, just because he was the youngest. I’ll never tell him how much I despised him for losing weight just like my sister, making me the fat child. I’ll never tell him how much I resented him for being able to write so well.

Can you imagine how sweet it felt for me when he stopped making friends in middle school? When his grades dropped in high school, when he gained weight again after graduation? When he stopped writing?

Sometimes, when I think about the boy he was, I look at myself and imagine his lost happiness driving into me like staples. Friends? Ka-chunk. There they are, in my chest. Grades? Ka-chunk. There they shine, on my forehead. Skinny? Ka-chunk. There it goes, from my stomach. Writing? Ka-chunk. There it lies, on my hand.

Help me, I want to say. I’m bleeding.

To My Mother

The night is winding down. The club is near-empty, and Karen is watching over Sarah as she vomits in the bathroom. Lightweight. I walk out for some fresh air, sucking in the soft glow of yellow light. The starry strings form a ceiling above me, breathtaking but blinding, hiding the blue night's actual stars from me, a billion cosmic secrets. It smells like cigarettes.

I stumble into a table, sit down. Laughing at myself, I ignore the grime, the germs, and I drop my head onto the metal surface. Cold. The sensation is wonderful because I’m hot. My lips, my mouth, the inside of my ears are buzzing, numb, and that’s wonderful too. I try humming something.

My mom is sitting in the driver’s seat, turning the wheel as she looks for a parking space. She hums a tuneless note, high, vague, happy-sounding. I see myself reaching over to poke her arm, deliberately annoying her. If I poke her, she could get distracted and we could crash, we could run someone over. But she’s humming.

She’s smiling and she’s humming; she’s somewhere else. She’s not the mother in the car, at the Costco parking lot, here with me. She’s the woman singing karaoke in the basement of our house, surrounded by her friends; her high voice – a bird’s voice – vibrating but true, herself swaying softly as she ignores the words that flash on the screen. She’s the woman buying designer clothes with money from her part-time job, the woman marrying a man for his humor, his good looks, his sociability. She’s the woman traveling all over the continental US, the woman eating an entire watermelon by herself.

She remembers her Korean, knows her English. During the week, she drives her children to soccer games, basketball practices, school events, she knows what goes on in their lives. She talks with them, they talk with her. She is important. Relevant.

I poke her. She stops humming.

To My Father

Dad, did you know? You are a pitiful man. You know what it’s like to have a deadbeat father, a runaway mother, the ghost of a brother. You have a half-sister too, just like me. The pain must have been unspeakably blinding, when Uncle died in that bike accident. He was your caretaker, your role model, your friend. It must hurt, to have your son remind you of him. It must have cut deep, every time that son put his T-shirt over his nose, so that he wouldn’t have to smell your cloud of cigarettes.

When you visited last Thanksgiving, we went to pick you up. You stumbled out of the Uber car, stomping towards us, arms raised. You crushed us to your chest. I could not believe my nose. But then you slurred your words, you talked too loudly, and I was left with no other choice.

You know, I drink now too. One time, I was lying on the floor of my living room. I was exhausted, more than ready to sleep. But I don’t have to describe something like that to you. You’ve done that before, haven't you? Fallen asleep, drunk, in the middle of our living room. That motivated me to get up. To brush myself off. To go to the bathroom.

“I’m not like my dad,” I kept on saying. “I don’t want to be like my dad.”

I cried, my head tucked into my friend’s lap.

But did you know? I’m an easy crier. I was a sniffling, sobbing mess when I watched Titanic in theaters, and even after all this time, I still cry when I read The Half-Blood Prince. You’re a crier too; I’ve seen you at it. You cry in sad movies, in sad times.

Do you remember that day when we watched movies together? I was going through a movie phase, and you were too. I told you my favorite actor was Leonardo DiCaprio. We talked about one of his movies, The Departed. We sat side-by-side while we watched a different crime movie, with Jake Gyllenhaal.

You’re such a know-it-all, like me, even though what we know is sometimes wrong. You also randomly check my Facebook sometimes, commenting, “I love you! I miss you, my pretty daughter!” no matter what I post there.

“I love you too!” I should say. Because I do.

Dad, one night, you made me wake up. The room was dark, the house was loud. I got out of bed and creaked the door open, to hear better, even though I could already hear well enough.

Mom was begging, probably on her knees. You were shouting about something in Korean. Something crashed. I guessed you’d flipped over the living room table.

My sister’s door creaked open too. Our wide, white eyes caught each other from across the blue space of the hallway. She sneaked over into my room and closed the door. The sound of your yelling, of a bird's trembling voice, softened just slightly.

“Don’t go downstairs,” my sister said.

I nodded.

“Just go back to bed.”

I nodded again.

She grabbed me by the wrist. “And don’t tell anyone about this.”

I nearly jumped, chilled more by her touch than by whatever was going on downstairs. “Okay,” I squeaked.

She let go of me. “Good night, I love you,” she said.

She left without waiting for a reply. Crying, she told me many years later, was something you do alone.

Many more years later, I'm here, with two of my friends. We're drunk, blinking at each other in the silence of 3AM. It's the first night of my life as a grown-ass adult, in most every sense of the word. What have I accomplished? The sidewalk is dark; fuzzy compared to the clear, white stars – the innumerable grains of salt that someone had been careless enough to spill across the skies. As the night goes on, those stars will dissolve into black waters that extend both light years away from me and all the way into me. For now, I see my friends, feel their warmth, hear the way we snort and giggle at sex jokes and at nothing. What is there to be proud of? Have I become a better person, any less of a monster?

You tell me.